Book Series: The Octagon Chronicles

A man wakes with amnesia to find that he had bested five swordsmen and that he carried a strange object. Saved from his grave injury by a healer of unique abilities and remarkable beauty, they learn that others of power and station are willing to kill for the object he carries. On the road to rescue his ransomed family, whom he does not remember, Imar’s mutual attraction to Dalla grows and he learns that the eight sided object in his pouch is a key to a faraway underground fortress containing advanced knowledge and technology from the forgotten past. Others would have the octagon key because it also unlocks access to powerful weapons unimaginable in this Medieval Age of Sail. Imar must find the self he cannot remember, keep the key from falling into the hands of evil, and decide whether to use or destroy the fortress.

The story takes place on the North American continent roughly 10,000 years from now. Continental shifting, geographical and climatic changes have occurred. Human kind is evolving a second history, several millennia after coming out a self-induced stone age. Technology, not too distant from now, happened too rapidly and the byproducts were pollution, famine, disease, and war—less than one percent of humankind survived. People went underground to survive and emerged with next to no memory or recorded history of the past, until a key was found that could unlock the technological marvels of that advanced age. A few genetically enhanced people with very high intelligence, survived the destruction in cryogenic chambers. Though they wish to help guide this feudal and quickly advancing world, they do not agree because of one’s lust for power and that one’s goal to seize the knowledge and weapons from the age of technology. Many want the octagon key for the great historical, medical, and industrial good it can unlock—others would destroy it—but some would have the power for world domination.

A guild Assassin from the Great Desert of Hamaud is hired to kidnap an eleven-year-old girl, Aideen. There may be one man who can stop him, the girl’s father, weapons master, Imar Amirson, but he is away on a quest so the girl is left to the mercy of assassin’s master. Imar has a bounty on him for a powerful device, the octagon key which can unlock the underground fortress and old world technology of Washington DC. Aideen’s grandmother, a retired privateer, learns of her granddaughter’s abduction while in the southern reaches and must choose between rescuing her husband or returning home in the world’s first and only airship to help the girl.

In the near future, mankind finally over did it. Over population, pollution, wars, and too much technology too fast destroyed the planet. Genetically enhanced for very high intelligence and powerful perceptive abilities, a group of these special people tried to warn world leaders and at least slow the rate of destruction, but their attempts failed. They gave up and went into cryogenic sleep while man bombed himself back into the stone-age. No one woke them for a long time. Ten thousand years passed when the few that survived were wakened into a feudal world on the brink of discovering gunpowder. A key is found. It is eight sided and activates a key pad that opens the long forgotten control room where the president and the joint chiefs of staff could safely order the machinations of war. The knowledge, technology, and power from such a find could do great good or vast evil. The octagon key is hidden and arises after three generations. Many want it. An amnesiac has it, for now.